Thirteen Days

Thirteen Days is a great film, although it probably lacks the necessary crash-bang-wallops to make it a hugely popular one.

And thank goodness, because these crash-bang-wallops would have been devastating. This, in short, is the story of the 13 days in 1962 when the world stood on the brink of nuclear war.

American spy planes had revealed that the Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, bringing the entire Western world (but mainly America, obviously) within their range.

For President Kennedy, this was a political crisis on a scale that is as difficult to imagine today as it is to picture which present-day politicians might be capable of resolving it.

This is a Kennedy that we have not seen for a long time - no womanising, not much drinking and none of that hanging around with showbiz pals.

This is Kennedy the statesman; Kennedy the politician of principle; Kennedy as he would probably like to have been remembered. Given the kicking his reputation has had in recent years, David Self's absorbing screenplay is as refreshing as it is revisionist.

But nor is it a whitewash. We see Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood) hesitate and change his mind. Does he bomb the missile sites, as his hawkish military advisers are so keen to?

Or will diplomacy, backed up by a naval blockade of Cuba, carry the day, as his own first instincts tell him, and his brother Bobby (Steven Culp) and political adviser Kenny O'Donnell (Kevin Costner) believe? Round and round go the arguments, with director Roger Donaldson doing a superb job of maintaining the tension.

With most of the film set in the claustrophobic confines of the White House and Pentagon, the few action sequences - the low-level reconnaissance flights, the naval stand-off, the spy planes - are used to maximum dramatic effect.

Whether O'Donnell really had quite such a pivotal role (we see him phoning individual pilots) is something for modern historians to argue over.

But it works for the film and it gives Costner the chance to return to the Kennedy story (he was the conspiracy-chasing district attorney in Oliver Stone's brain-numbing JFK).

The ensemble acting is superb and easily overcomes the curious vagaries of casting and make-up, which see Culp looking uncannily like Bobby Kennedy and Greenwood looking nothing like his brother.

A great film and a great way of catching up with such a momentous chapter in recent history.